In the current office environment, meetings have taken people a lot of time and energy. An executive will often spend a much larger percentage of his/her work time on meetings. Therefore the efficiency of the scheduling process used and the quality of the schedules generated affect the working of an organization to a large extent. Typically, the initiator of a meeting will have to negotiate with every attendee to arrange the meeting at such time that is acceptable to all the attendees in order to make sure that all attendees will be available to attend the meeting. Especially when a meeting has many attendees, the discourse of negotiation will often go on several rounds before reaching an agreement of the appropriate meeting time. Even when everyone involved in a meeting has available times to meet, the process for searching for a commonly available time, in the presence of communication delays (e.g., either through electronic mail or contacting by phone) and in the presence of other meetings being scheduled concurrently, can be frustrating and lead to less than satisfactory results.
Most of the commercially available software for scheduling over computer networks have been personal computer-based systems. Similarly, there have been a number of research projects that assist a human user in meeting scheduling process. However, there are severe drawbacks in the current commercial products and research systems. First, the scheduling discourse still needs user's interference. There are disadvantages with the user's interference: it takes a lot of the user's time and energy, and it can produce errors that might be introduced by human users due to the routine and tedious nature of the meeting schedule. Second, the scheduling activity is static. The dynamic nature of the users' calendars cannot be considered in time, which often leads to the failure of meeting scheduling. Third, there is a lack of privacy and security. The user must open his/her calendar to others, the necessary privacy cannot be guaranteed. The openness of the user's calendar also facilitates the malicious scheduling and attack. In addition, most current systems are the centralized ones in which the request for meeting scheduling must be sequenced and multiple meetings cannot be scheduled concurrently, which severely affects the throughput of the scheduling process.